Anarchist Seeds Beneath the Snow - Libcom

Edward Carpenter 37
Charles Carpenter’s marriage in 1833 led to his retirement from the bar; after his
father-in-law’s death in 1841 he and his family were able to move from Walthamstow
to Brighton; and when the wealthy Admiral Carpenter died in 1846 he was ‘freed ...
from any real cause of pecuniary anxiety – though from time to time all through his
later life he was liable to fits of considerable depression and nervousness about his
monetary concerns’. 7 It was then observation of the nagging anxiety of his neurasthenic
father’s life as a rentier that accounts for a major thrust of Carpenter’s critique
of the unhappinesses of the middle-class life, particularly in England’s Ideal:
From his childhood he is trained ostensibly in the fear of God, but really in the fear
of Money. The whole tenor of the conversation which he hears round him, and his
early teaching, tend to impress upon him the awful dangers of not having enough....
The youthful tender conscience soon comes to look upon ... the acquisition of large
dividends as part of the serious work of life ... he realizes with painful clearness the
difficulty of finding investments which shall be profitable and also secure; circulars,
reports, newspaper-cuttings, and warning letters, flow in upon him; sleepless nights
are followed by anxious days; telegrams and railway journeys succeed each other.
But the game goes on: the income gets bigger, and the fear of the workhouse looms
closer! ... the hapless boy, now an old man before his time, with snatched meals and
care-lined brow, goes to and fro like an automaton... 8
Carpenter was the seventh of ten siblings, six of them sisters. When he reached
the age of ten he was sent as a day boy to Brighton College, a public school which had
been founded only in 1845. That the family was somewhat unconventional is indicated
by all of them – with the exception of the eldest brother, who had just left school
and joined the Indian Civil Service – taking off in 1857 to spend a year in France,
where they lived at Versailles and Edward and Alfred attended the Lycée Impériale.
Charles Carpenter was an intellectual: he had known and admired Coleridge, studied
German philosophy in the original, and was ‘a philosophic Radical of the Mill school’
and a strong supporter of Henry Fawcett when MP for Brighton. 9 Carpenter greatly
loved both his parents – they were ‘the best people in the world’ – but his mother
regarded ‘all expression of tender feeling little short of a sin’: ‘We early learned to
suppress and control emotion, and to fight our own battles alone...’ 10
Carpenter did not leave school until he was nineteen, but still spent five months
learning German in Heidelberg before going up in 1864, now aged twenty, to Trinity
Hall, Cambridge, where he read mathematics. He graduated in 1868 as tenth wrangler
(that is, with the tenth best marks in mathematics that year in the entire university)
(MDD) or Tsuzuki; but for this paragraph see also Ida G. Hyett, ‘From the Family Point of View’,
in Beith, pp. 112–18.
7 MDD, pp. 37–8.
8 Edward Carpenter, England’s Ideal: And Other Papers on Social Subjects (1887; London: Swan
Sonnenschein, revised edn, 1895), pp. 88–9 (Carpenter’s emphasis).
9 MDD, pp. 38–9.
10 Ibid., pp. 14, 15, 42.